How to Be a Successful Social Media Marketer, a guide towards best social media success. As things are now shaping up, if you are not on social media you don’t exist. The presence of social media in our lives has become ubiquitous. Engaging customers on social sites is the latest trend for organizations to secure more business and as a result, they are constantly striving to find new ways to keep the customers hooked to their brands on social platforms.

An increasing number of brands are now turning to social platform to initiate interactions with customers. Web 2.0 has opened new channels of communication for them by facilitating both way interactions. As a result an increasing number of CRM solution providers are integrating social media to their software that can help businesses grab, store and analyze social performance of their customers to anticipate future changes. However, merely mining social data isn’t enough. Organizations need effective social media strategy and engage resources in deriving useful insight from it. In order to be successful on social media one needs to keep the following points in mind.

Be selective: Your success on the platform will depend upon your efficiency in selecting the right audience. The demography on the social sites is varied. Therefore a careful analysis of your customer base will help you get an idea of who your customers are. If you want an insight on your customer demography, peep into the customer relationship software.CRM solution has come a long way from being a contact management system to transform into business intelligence (BI) software.

Be relevant: Sharing anything that you may like isn’t an option in social media. Your social media communication needs to be relevant and useful to the customer. It is very important to identify what your customers want to hear. Sharing useful and insightful content is the key to succeed in social media platform.

Be timely: Being timely is everything on social media. Today’s customers live on real-time information and if you can’t keep pace with that you are sure to lose your audience. Whenever an opportunity occurs don’t delay to strike a conversation to engage your audience. Be urgent and timely on your timeline.

Be share worthy: If you are taking your digital marketing seriously, be share worthy. Create content that your audience would love to share. Ask yourself the following:

Is your content engaging?

Does it make you audience laugh?

Is it adding value to your audience?

What is in it for your audience?

Is your content worth creating a viral?

Will your audience share your content?

Content marketing has really become very important for organizations. Sharing exciting and valuable content now can make all the difference between successful and not-so-successful digital marketing strategies. Here is what sells on social media:

Informative: Create content that would add some real value to the reader.

Funny: Being funny and witty is always attractive. Fun videos get most number of shares.

Controversial: Judiciously created controversy can actually benefit your brand. But it’s a very fine line to tread and you need to be careful that you don’t attract unwanted criticism.

Emotional: Emotion sells. Yes, they always do.

Call for action: That would inspire your audience to make a decision.

Polls: Run polls to learn about customer preferences. Social media polls are really popular.

Questions: Encourage your audience to offer their input. This would help you engaging your audience better.

What’s your gain?

One may wonder what his gain in all social media marketing process is. Well, the returns are both immediate and long term. Once you offer value to your customers first you can then ask them to return the favor. Often direct sales approaches fail due to this. Direct mailers ask the customer to buy without showing him his exact benefits in doing so.

In social media you need to be valuable, genuine and authentic and of course, must actually discuss about profitable propositions for your audience to make them coming back to you for more.

Lastly, most important factor is integration. Many marketers consider social media marketing separately from the rest of the marketing efforts. But what they actually need is an integrated platform where email marketing and social media marketing will work hand-in-hand to build, promote and maintain brand value.

Patricia is a full time CRM consultant at ConvergeHub and part-time blogger. She has earned herself quite a fame as a specialist and market expert in CRM software. In the last five year she has worked with various companies as CRM consultant to help them move their businesses to cloud. Her expertise lies in offering cloud CRM consultation, CRM customization and integration solutions to small enterprises. For last one she is engaged in building ConvergeHub, cloud-based CRM solution for SMBs, as a consultant.Follow her at Twitter:@convergehub